Cal’s Books

New York Times bestselling author John Calipari, the charismatic Naismith Hall of Fame coach who has returned Kentucky to college basketball prominence, reveals the secrets behind his unparalleled ability to transform a group of former high school superstars into a selfless, cohesive team in his new book “Success is the Only Option: The Art of Coaching Extreme Talent”, which will be available in bookstores across the country and online Nov. 15 with presale orders available now.

Calipari is highly regarded for his ability to recruit the country’s top high school talent without making outlandish promises. Instead, he believes, "Commit to each other, be about each other without sacrificing your own goals, and by doing this you can achieve all YOUR dreams and more."

With that philosophy, Calipari led Kentucky to four Final Fours in a five-year period from 2011-2015. “One and done” players like John Wall, Anthony Davis and DeMarcus Cousins are all currently NBA All-Stars. And Calipari continues to mold these individual superstars into a cohesive whole, playing for each other with selfless commitment and fierce intensity.

Expanding on his 2014 New York Times bestselling book “Players First: Coaching from the Inside Out”, “Success is the Only Option” digs deeper as Calipari for the first time distills his methods and philosophies in a way that will resonate with not just athletes and coaches but business leaders who are trying to get maximum performance out of their own top talent. Coaching a successful basketball team is much like building a successful business. For teams to succeed, even the most talented performers must sacrifice some of their own glory while still feeling that they are reaching for individual goals.

A basketball team is an intimate workplace. The blend is everything and character matters.

For Calipari, each season is a series of discoveries as he learns how to unleash the extreme talent in each of his players and mold them into championship material as college basketball comes to a crescendo every spring. Calipari can’t control everything, yet he is responsible for everything—which is something any CEO can understand.

"Success is the Only Option" offers real life lessons into leadership, team building and creating a culture of achievement that are applicable far beyond the basketball court. These are the lessons for anyone seeking to inspire talented individuals to reach for their best selves and contribute to a greater good.

eBook

The legendary — and legendarily candid — University of Kentucky basketball coach opens up as he never has before about what separates good teams and coaches from bad ones and about the things that are seriously awry in today’s college game. In Players First, a New York Times Best Seller, John Calipari relates for the first time anywhere his experiences over his first four years coaching the Kentucky Wildcats, college basketball’s most fabled program, from the doldrums to a national championship, drawing lessons about leadership, character, and the path to personal and collective victory. At its core, Calipari’s coaching philosophy centers on keeping his focus on the players — what they need to get the best out of themselves and one another. He is beloved by his players for being utterly honest with them, not by making promises, but by making commitments that he always keeps. He knows that in this age, they come to Kentucky to prepare for the NBA; every year he gets players who in a previous era would have gone directly into the pros from high school but now have to play college basketball for one year. Calipari has fought against this system, but he has to play within it, and so he does, better than anyone. The result is an extraordinary leadership challenge: every year Coach Cal gets a handful of eighteen-year-old kids who have been in a bubble for the previous four years at least, filled with hype about their own greatness, and most come to Kentucky feeling sure that they will play for their coach only for seven months before they go on to greater glory. Every year, he has to reinvent his team. After his 2012 NCAA championship, it was particularly dramatic; he lost his first six players in the NBA Draft, meaning that someone who couldn’t even start for Kentucky was a draft pick. The overall record at Kentucky, and for his career, puts Calipari in the pantheon of the greatest coaches in the history of the game. Bold, funny, and truthful, like Coach Calipari himself, Players First is truly the first deep reckoning with the meaning of his experiences and the gifts of insight they offer.

By: John Calipari If recent history has taught us anything, it’s that nobody goes through life unscathed—no matter how rich, how smart, how talented, or how fortunate they may be. White collar, blue collar, or no collar, there is an undeniable commonality to the raw emotion that strikes people when they are knocked down. University of Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari has experienced his share of public setbacks, but he has learned that bad situations are permanent only if you allow them to be. What Coach Cal—as players, peers, and his legion of fans that make up the Big Blue Nation call him—learned from his experiences was the importance of having the right attitude when dealing with life’s major impediments. On the court and off, he emphasizes to his players that a big part of success is being able to handle obstacles. Now he is offering you the chance to learn the same strategies that he teaches the young men who play for him. By becoming an active participant in your own resurrection—through practice exercises and tips from Coach Cal and his deep bench of highly successful people—you too will gain the tools and insight to understand that it’s never a matter of how far you have fallen, but instead it’s about how high you bounce back.

Having worked as an assistant at Kansas and Pitt, Calipari took over the basketball program at the University of Massachusetts in 1988, after the school had recorded 10 straight losing seasons. Adopting the motto that he and coauthor Weiss (Full Court Pressure) also use for this conventional autobiography, Calipari proved himself a fine motivator of young players and an astute manipulator of television to publicize UMass's increasingly successful organization. Each year, his teams improved on the record of the previous season, climaxing in 1996, when his players had a 35-2 record, were ranked first in the nation for much of the season and went to the NCAA's Final Four. The star, Marcus Camby, was judged the best in the nation, and Calipari himself was chosen coach of the year by at least four court groups.

Whether your team is trying to win its first game of the high school season or preparing to take the floor for the national championship, you need to have a multitude of options for your offense. John Calipari brings winning one step closer with his tried-and-true collection of offensive plays. Presented in an easy-to-follow format with diagrams for reference, this book is a must for coaches looking to optimize their half-court game. John Calipari took the basketball program at the University of Massachusetts from one of the country's worst and made it into one of the elite, a program with legitimate national championship aspirations. A new state-of-the-art facility, the perpetually sold-out William D. Mullins Center; five straight Atlantic 10 regular-season titles; five straight A-10 Tourney titles; five straight NCAA appearances; trips to the Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight; and 1996's trip to the Final Four sent a clear message to the basketball world: besides developing some outstanding UMass teams, John Calipari also built a winning program. He has also served as head coach of the New Jersey Nets.

SOCIAL MEDIA & MORE

Dream Maker

As someone who prides himself on helping young men reach their dreams, Coach Cal has helped 39 players get selected in the NBA Draft during his college coaching career, including 28 over his first seven seasons at Kentucky, which is more than double any other coach.

Four No. 1 overall selections (Derrick Rose, John Wall, Anthony Davis and Karl-Anthony Towns) during the nine drafts from 2008 to 2016. No other coach has more than two No. 1 picks

In 2010, five of his UK players were selected in the first round for the first time in NBA history

His six players in the 2012 and 2015 NBA drafts are the most in the two-round era

Awards Won

2015 AP Coach of the Year
2015 Naismith National Coach of the Year
2015 NABC Coach of the Year
2015 The Sporting News National Coach of the Year
2015 Adolph Rupp National Coach of the Year
2015 SEC Coach of the Year (AP/Coaches)
2015 USBWA District IV Coach of the Year
2012 Nell & John Wooden Coach of the Year Leadership Award
2012 Naismith National Coach of the Year Finalist
2012 SEC Coach of the Year (AP/Coaches)
2010 Adolph Rupp National Coach of the Year
2010 Naismith National Coach of the Year Finalist
2010 SEC Coach of the Year (AP)
2010 Sporting News SEC Coach of the Year
2010 Yahoo! Sports SEC Coach of the Year
2010 USBWA District IV Coach of the Year
2009 NABC Co-Coach of the Year
2009 Jim Phelan National Coach of the Year
2009 Sports Illustrated National Coach of the Year
2009 Iba National Coach of the Year Finalist
2009 C-USA Coach of the Year
2008 Naismith National Coach of the Year
2008 C-USA Coach of the Year
2008 Phelan National Coach of the Year Finalist
2008 Iba National Coach of the Year Finalist
2007 Phelan National Coach of the Year Finalist
2007 USBWA District 4 Coach of the Year
2007 Basketball Times South Region COY
2006 C-USA Coach of the Year
2004 NABC District 7 Coach of the Year
1996 Naismith National Coach of the Year
1996 NABC National Coach of the Year
1996 The Sporting News National Coach of the Year
1996 Atlantic 10 Coach of the Year
1995 Naismith National Coach of the Year Finalist
1994 Naismith National Coach of the Year Finalist
1994 Atlantic 10 Coach of the Year
1993 USBWA District I Coach of the Year
1993 Atlantic 10 Coach of the Year
1992 Eastern Basketball Coach of the Year

Coaching Tree

Not only has Coach Cal molded young men into professional basketball players, he’s also helped shape his former assistants into head coaches. Three of Calipari’s former assistants are current head coaches at Division I programs.

Winningest Active Coaches

Worth noting

John Calipari is one of only two coaches to lead three different schools to a Final Four

At Kentucky, Coach Cal took the Cats to four Final Fours in a five-year stretch, joining Mike Krzyzewski and John Wooden as the only two coaches to do so

Calipari owns the most single-season wins with 38, tying his own record set at Memphis (2008) and Kentucky (2012, 2015)

Under Coach Cal, Kentucky became the first team in college basketball history to start a season 38-0 (2015)

His teams have made 17 NCAA Tournament appearances, six Final Fours, three national title games and won one national title. He has an NCAA Tournament record of 48-16 (.750)

Calipari is one of two coaches (Roy Williams) in NCAA Division I history to have 400 or more wins in the first 16 years as a head coach. Calipari had 416 wins in his first 16 years

Calipari has nine 30-win seasons, the third most for a head coach in Division I history. His five straight from 2006-10 is an NCAA Division I record

Since the 2005-06 season, he has the best winning percentage among all Division I coaches

Calipari’s overall on-court record is 662-187 (.780) following his seventh season at UK. He entered the 2015-16 season with the third-highest winning percentage among active NCAA Division I coaches with 10 years of experience at college basketball’s Division I level, trailing only Mark Few and Roy Williams.

Success rate

Fifteen of John Calipari's final 18 seniors that came through the Memphis program earned their bachelor’s degrees

All 14 players at UK who were eligible to graduate by the end of their senior years in the Calipari era have graduated, including three players (Patrick Patterson, Jarrod Polson and Alex Poythress) who earned their degree in just three years

Following a 3.4 grade-point average in the 2013 spring semester — the highest in Coach Cal’s tenure at UK — the Wildcats’ scholarship players posted a 3.11 GPA for the second consecutive semester in the 2014 fall semester

In seven of the last 11 semesters, Calipari's teams have posted a combined grade-point average of 3.0 or better.

UK's NCAA Academic Progress Rate in Coach Cal's first four years at UK was an average of 989, well above the NCAA's minimum standard of 930 required to play in the postseason

About The Foundation

The Calipari Foundation invests in communities. These communities are not limited by geography — they can also be educational, social and spiritual in nature. The foundation’s purpose is to improve the quality of life both in and through these communities, with a particular focus on enriching the lives of children.